Today We’re Revealing Our Secret Source For Discovering New Talents — Including These 23 Artists and Designers

If you're one of the many, many people who have always wanted to ask us the same million dollar question — how do we decide who to feature on Sight Unseen? — pay attention, because we're answering it here today. First things first, we feature people and things we like, it's as simple as that. More complex is how we find those people and things. Some of our biggest sources are Instagram, exhibitions we attend, and submission emails we receive. But not too long ago, we found another source that's an endless wellspring for discovering new names in art and design: Cargo.
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Week of April 15, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A sneak preview of an all-star Spanish design exhibition coming to New York next month, the hard-to-get pastel-colored glassware we're pining for, and a jaw-dropping new collaboration between a Belgian fashion designer and architect, pictured above.
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Week of April 1, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Solo exhibitions abound by some of our favorite artists, burl wood and glass blocks continue to pop up in unexpected places, and a killer collaboration by two New York talents is one of our favorite launches so far this year.
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Material Lust Independent

Frustrated by the Limits of Design, Material Lust Sets Its Sights on the Art World

Not much had recently been heard from Material Lust until this March, when, after a few quiet years, they popped back on our radar, showing neither at a design gallery nor a furniture show, but at the New York art fair Independent, in a Spring Studios skybox overlooking a maze of gallery booths. Frustrated by the literalness of conversations they were having in the world of furniture design — and with their practice taking an increasingly conceptual turn — the pair made the conscious decision to turn Material Lust from a design brand into an artist collective.
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Patricia Treib’s Paintings Are Abstract, But Rooted in the World of Objects

In Brooklyn-based painter Patricia Treib’s expansive abstract canvases, frothy pastels and opulent jewel tones abut daring and clever interventions of palette — a sudden wash of matte elephant gray against a translucent seafoam green, or a block of deep mahogany propping up a pale blue stain. Her paintings are a pleasure to take in, with a healthy dose of art history and a deep interest in the world of material objects as well as the physical properties of paint.
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Five Artists We Loved At Armory Arts Week 2019

Armory Arts Week was admittedly a little weird this year. Collective Design took a sabbatical, as did NADA, which hosted a gallery open downtown in place of its sprawling art fair. Spring/Break moved out of its former Condé Nast digs and we never quite made it to the new location. And, oddest of all, the pier that typically hosts VOLTA showed structural damage at the eleventh hour, leaving a raft of galleries and artists homeless (some were folded into a last-minute show at David Zwirner galleries titled, appropriately, Plan B). Luckily, there was still plenty to love.
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In Brussels, New Designs at the Place Where Art, Architecture, and Industry Meet

When we first heard that Belgian architects Kersten Geers and David Van Severen were collaborating with the Kortrijk-born, Turin-based painter Pieter Vermeersch for an exhibition at Maniera Gallery, we became, we'll admit, somewhat unreasonably excited. Our love for Vermeersch's signature gradients is well-documented on this site, and, if you'll recall, Office KGDVS's angular furniture collection was what set off our love for the Brussels-based Maniera all the way back in 2014.
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At Paris London Hong Kong, a Danish Artist’s Spare, Self-Contained Vignettes

What is it about self-contained vignettes — in which the artist creates not only the work but also the structure the work sits upon — that are so pleasing? This is the second exhibition of its kind that we've featured this week, in which the plinth is part and parcel with the piece: Called "Bit by Bit Above the Edge of Things," Danish artist Marie Herwald Hermann’s first exhibition at Paris London Hong Kong in Chicago presents six of these tableaus — primarily made from porcelain, stoneware, and silicone — framing a small room punctuated by a seventh piece in ceramic, fiber, and wood.
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The Matisse- and Picasso-Inspired Danish Artist On the Brink of Stardom

It’s hard not to look at Christiane Spangsberg’s paintings as a cross between Matisse and Picasso, but when you start really exploring the simplicity of the lines, the additions of a lilac or pink or teal, and the titles of the works — they become so much more. The Copenhagen-based artist has found a way to explore the perception of people in their daily and digital lives through her emotive portraits.
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You’ll Never Guess Which European Metropolis Inspired Svenja Deininger’s Latest Body of Work

Sometimes the reason you are drawn to one piece of art or another is obvious. In the case of Viennese artist Svenja Deininger — who opens "Crescendo," her third solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, this Thursday — we could say it is because her work falls somewhere pleasingly on the spectrum between figurative and abstract. At its most abstract, it resembles the color-field painters we espouse so heartily on this site; at its most figurative, there is something almost Hockney-esque about her canvases. But sometimes the reason you are drawn to one piece of art or another reveals itself to you only later.
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